“Detective Mangino?”
“Yes.”
“This is Sonia Shriver. You told me to call if I found out anything new.”
“Yes, Sonia. Tell me what you have.”
“I had a lady leave a message telling me she was suspicious about Melanie’s murder because of something she read in the paper. She didn’t leave her name, but my caller ID informed me it was a Maureen Baker.”
“Sonia, she wouldn’t have read anything if your office wouldn’t have leaked pertinent information to the press.”
“I know. You have to understand that it wasn’t me, though. I’ve only talked to people in my office I deemed relevant to the investigation. One of them must have talked. But I’ve been trying to call Maureen at home for two days now and I’m not getting any answer.”
There was silence between them.
“What exactly did she say on her message,” asked Mangino?
“When she read that Melanie had called Child Protective Services over Mr. Massey’s son, it reminded her of an incident she had with his son. Until she read about Melanie’s call, she had always thought the incident was strange, but she didn’t know what to do with it.”
“Did she say what it was?” Detective Mangino was getting interested.
“She didn’t. I am asking you to go over there as quickly as possible to find out what is going on. I’m very concerned that she is not answering. And….I hope…”
“You hope what?”
“I hope that if this leads somewhere, you might be a little happier that my office leaked the information. It could be possible that because of the leak, the crime gets solved.”
“We are a long way from that point. You need to be a little more responsible for your employee’s actions. If the crime gets solved, I would be happy, but you need to realize the reasons for not divulging this information too early in an investigation.”
“I know. I’m sorry. When you get back from checking it out will you give me a call? I really care about what is going on and I want this crime solved as much as you do.”
“I know. Give me her number and I’ll stop by. Just to make sure everything is alright.”
“Thank you. I would really appreciate it, and please call me either way.”
They knew what she meant by either way. They hung up the phone.
Mangino walked down the hall to Chanello’s office and knocked. He invited her in.
“Detective Chanello.”
“Detective Mangino.”
Jim walked over and closed the doors and blinds. Then he walked up to Mangino.
“What can I do for you? Maybe give you the best kiss you have ever experienced?”
Kate just smiled and it was too much for either of them to bear. Jim pulled her close and kissed her with wild passion. After a couple of minutes, they gently pulled away from each other.
“I know this isn’t the time, but I got another call from Sonia Shriver.”
“Why did she call you when she could have leaked it to the press?”
“I know. I got on her case about that too. Someone else left a message.”
Detective Mangino explained everything to detective Chanello and they agreed to go to Maureen Baker’s house. After looking in the police computer under Maureen Baker, they identified which address they needed to go to by cross-referencing her name with the phone number Sonia had given to Kate. If such a simple method like this hadn’t worked, they could have used more formal channels to get her address.
They were quiet as they were driving. It’s always good news to get another lead, but Sonia’s comments about Mrs. Baker not answering her phone for a couple of days worried Mangino.
They pulled up to the front of Maureen Baker’s home. It was a small house with a small, but well kept yard.
The detectives got out of the car and took a look around.
“You notice anything here,” asked detective Chanello. “All of her neighbors have their blinds up, or their front or garage doors open.” There was pure silence coming from Maureen Baker’s house.
They walked up to the front door and began to knock. No answer. After a couple of minutes, detective Chanello knocked again and began calling out Maureen’s name.
“This is detective Chanello with the Southern California Police Department. Please open up.”
“I’ll go take a look around back,” said detective Mangino.
She went around back while Jim began looking around at the front windows for any sign of forced entry.
“Jim….Jim, come around back,” detective Mangino yelled. He quickly moved to the backyard where she was.
“The screen is off, and it looks like the window might have been jimmied open.” It was one of those cheap window locks, so it was hard to tell if they were looking at rust damage or scraping type damage.
“Should we go in?”
“We’d better get a warrant.”
“Somebody might be dying in there.”
“We don’t have any reason to believe that. Besides that, we want all the evidence to be allowed in court if a crime was committed here.”
They were quickly walking back to the front yard when a car pulled into the driveway. The detectives walked up to the window.
“Can I help you?”
“Who are you, sir?”
“I am John Baker.”
“Sir, it’s possible a crime has been committed here. We need your keys.”
The man got out of his car and started hurrying toward the front door, concerned about his family.
“What kind of crime are you talking about?” He was looking back at the police while briskly walking toward his door. They were following him.
“Sir, please let us go in and check out the house first.”
“This is my damn house and I’m going in it.” As he said it, he opened up the door. “Maureen, Christie,” he said as he was walking toward the bedroom. The police were following him closely. When he walked into his bedroom, he immediately fell to the ground from the horror of seeing his bloody wife.
Detective Mangino tried to console him while Chanello did a quick check for vital signs. There were none in the lady.
“Sir, is anyone else in the house?”
“My daughter should be her,” he said.
“Where,” yelled Chanello?
“In her room! Follow me!”
He rushed out the door and went into the other room where a child lay, all bloody. He checked her pulse and he thought that he heard a faint sign of life, like a cool breeze on the hottest day.
The man stayed at the door. “Christie..” he barely spoke.
“I think that she is alive,” detective Chanello excitedly yelled to his partner. “Call an ambulance.”
The man got a ray of hope and rushed over to his daughter.
“Christie!”
“Talk gently, she’ll know your voice,” said the detective.
“Daddy’s here. I love you. Everything is going to be alright.”
“Detective Chanello, paramedics are on their way,” she said. “And…the medical examiner is coming, too,” she said with disappointment over the loss of life.
After a few minutes, the paramedics confirmed that the young girl, Christie, was still alive. They finally were able to move her onto the stretcher so they could get her to the hospital. The paramedics offered no hope, though. She was in a coma and would probably stay that way, until she died.
It wasn’t until a little later when Dr. Jones, the medical examiner pulled up. Nobody thought about him while they were still trying to stabilize Christie, but everyone was tired when they realized it took him twenty five minutes to respond to the call. Detective Chanello was particularly annoyed.
“It’s about time you got here.”
“I had to finish what I was doing first.”
“It’s been almost a half an hour.”
“What’s more important is whether or not the police have compromised my crime scene.” Dr. Jones said, annoyed.
Jim said, “Don’t give me your crap. All I did was check her vital signs. I was hoping she was alive, so at the very least, I wouldn’t have had to call you.”
“Ok, ok,” said Dr. Jones. “I’ve got it from here. We need to start working together since we’re on the same team. Why don’t you go back to the office and do your paperwork, and I’ll finish up. We can meet in the morning.”
“Right,” said Chanello.
The detective walked up to his partner, “we should go to the hospital and see if Mr. Baker can give a quick statement.”
“It wasn’t him. He already told me his alibi. We just need to call this list of friends and they’ll confirm he was at the river in Lake Havasu, Arizona. And we’ll compare that with the time of death which we’ll know soon.”
“Dr. Jones said it probably happened late last night around 1 or 2 am.”
“In which Mr. Baker has a strong alibi.”
“At the very least we can try to comfort him. Sometimes we forget that is a part of our job as well.”
“You are right. Let’s go.”
At the hospital, Mr. Baker turned it around. Instead of getting interrogated by the police, he questioned them. How did they know she might be in trouble? And why didn’t they get to the house earlier? They tried to tell him as much as they could without compromising the investigation. But he was angry. He wanted someone to blame, but they couldn’t give him a suspect, so he blamed them.
“Mr. Baker, I know that you have suffered a horrific loss, but you need to know we will work as hard as we can to bring you some justice and closure. We just need you to answer a few questions first,” Kate was saying emphatically.
Mr. Baker walked over to the chair and sat down next to Christie’s bed. He reached out with his left hand and put it on Christie.
“Alright. I’ll try to answer whatever I can.”
“Had Mrs. Baker ever mentioned a Mr. Massey or his son, Jay, to you?”
He sprung up quickly, “She had read something in the paper about some murder and said she had called the authorities. She said she had a strange encounter with Michael Massey's son just like that woman Melanie had.”
“What did you say when she told you this?”
“I told her not to get involved when she said it was concerning Mr. Massey. He is too powerful and rich.”
“And?”
“She said at first she had called the police, but they said they’d call back within a few days. They had a long list to go through. This frustrated Maureen that they didn’t call back quickly. She said she was irritated so she called Child Protective Services and left a message. It was after she had left them a message that she told me, and that’s when I told her to stay out of it. The next day someone called from there. I have caller ID and I just ignored it. I didn’t tell Maureen they had called. I was hoping she would forget about the whole thing. I left the next morning to go to the river in Arizona to water ski”.
“Who did you go with?”
“I went with three other guys. One was Jon Peters who owns a boat. The other was Joe Simpson who has a camper we stayed in and his little brother, Robert, came.”
“So, you left Wednesday morning, drove all day, and then water skied through Saturday?”
“Yes, then first thing this morning we drove back.”
“Why so early? It was noon when we saw you at your house.”
“It takes about six hours. We left early because this time of year the highway gets jammed. We wanted to beat the traffic.”
“Is there anything else you can think of that your wife said about Mr. Massey? Anything at all?” Kate spoke up.
“Only that his son was sweet but was already showing signs of emotional problems. He could be a bully, a loner kind, and not sociable.”
The detectives got the numbers of Mr. Baker’s friends so they could check his alibi. They also explained why they had gone to his house to check on Maureen in the first place. He started to get mad again and was asking “What if?” questions. “What if my wife would have minded her own business and not made that call in the first place? What if he would have taken her with him on his weekend getaway?” Kate used her womanly gentleness to try and comfort him. She reminded him to do his job and be strong for his child while they would do theirs and catch the killer. But it seemed like matters could get worse. Before they left, Mr. Baker was firmly committed. He was going to sue Mr. Massey for the wrongful death of his wife.
Later, they went to the police station to fill out their reports. Neither had gotten any sleep and they were exhausted. It was midnight.
“Can I drive you home?”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
As they were driving, Detective Chanello rolled down his window.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why is Maureen Baker dead?” “Is it because she called Sonia Shriver at Child Protective Services?”
“We heard the message. Does that mean Sonia knows something else?”
“According to the message Maureen left on her phone, she had read in the paper about the police going to Mr. Massey’s house to question him about the murder of Melanie.”
“And she says she has some information about Mr. Massey too.”
“Right. After Sonia’s office leaked that Melanie had called Child Protective Services about Mr. Massey, and this could be a motive for him to kill Melanie, she said she had a story to tell C.P.S. about Mr. Massey and his son.”
“And now she is dead too.”
Detective Mangino looked at him.
“She is brave. If the papers reported a murder was committed for a call to C.P.S., why would she then risk her own life and call them? How did Mr. Massey know they had called C.P.S? Both murders occurred right after the victims had called. If they saw something, you think he might have killed them before they had a chance to inform them. How did Mr. Massey know?” detective Chanello kept asking.
“Melanie was at Mr. Massey’s party and called the next day. Maybe he was planning on killing her because Jay asked if he could see Melanie naked? Remember what Melanie's parents said,”
“Does that mean he might have talked to Mrs. Baker over the last couple of days, too? We need an answer to this question. He is a rich man. Is it possible Maureen wanted to bribe him or just confront him?”
“I don’t know. We should try to get the phone records.”
They were driving along, almost to Detective Mangino’s home.
The phone rang.
“Yes. Do you have an address? Tell her we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“What’s up?”
“We need to go to the Holiday Inn hotel in Whittier. Do you know how to get there?”
“Yes. What’s up?”
“We have a Kay Massey, the daughter-in-law of Mr. Massey, who wants to talk to us. Dispatch says she is scared out of her mind and wants to talk to us now. She is leaving first thing in the morning to go back home to Virginia and won’t be back.”
“Is she the wife of Roger?”
“I think so. Maybe she will be more truthful than he was. It’s too late at night to hear crap about how great Mr. Massey is.”
“What about Donny?”
“We have 72 hours. Let him rot in hell until we can figure this out. As far as I’m concerned, he is still the prime suspect. He said he was going to kill her, and she wound up dead. Besides, we don’t know what Mr. Massey has done to his child. Was he molesting him or was he just a bad father? A lot of people might blame him for being a bad dad, but that doesn’t mean he would kill over it.”
“We have two independent people who have called Child Protective Services on him and are now dead. How many times have you called them?”
“I see your point. At this time it might all be speculation. On the other hand, once you have read in the paper that someone else has turned him in, you might be more inclined to remember little things and turn them into mountains. Let’s just see what this Kay has to say.”
He pulled into the parking lot of the Hilton just as he said this. They walked up to the front desk and inquired about which room Kay was in. As the front desk man was looking her up, she appeared behind them.
“Detectives?” They turned around.
“Kay,” Mangino said as she stuck out her hand. “I’m detective Mangino and this is my partner, detective Chanello.”